In consumer-focused internet services, user-provided location information along with mapping services is used by internet portals and other service providers to present or organize information for the consumer, in a technology area referred to as location-based services (LBS). Though these services have relied on user-supplied location information, especially on the desktop, mobile services are coming to market that utilize user location available from the network or collected from a user device.
Even before the popularization of LBS, a device's location in a communications network has always been implicitly available. A radio-based point-to-point communications network, such as a cell-phone network, must be able to uniquely identify the mobile device (e.g., cellular phone) and a general coverage area in which the mobile device is located. Every cell phone needs to know a unique identifier of the cell tower that it communicates with to enable the cell phone to place and receive calls successfully. This identifier is known as the cell tower ID and is kept unique by the various carriers. Through identification of the cell tower, termed cell ID positioning, location-based technologies may be employed, however, the technology is not very accurate. At best, one cannot even get building-level accuracy with basic cell ID positioning. A cell ID that uniquely identifies a user is therefore always known, and from this a point-and-radius description of device location may be determined. Device location in a mobile network may be more accurately determined if needed by triangulating the mobile device with known locations in a network infrastructure.
For growing mobile location-based services, a communications network becomes a source of readily-available, secure, but potentially inaccurate device location data. As network requirements and capabilities have varied, the resolution and accuracy of endpoint locations have varied according to design and performance requirements of the network. Nevertheless, device location information has been closely guarded by network operators for fear of compromising customer privacy. The emerging danger is that industry's previous diligence in protecting location information may be soon overwhelmed by the explosion of location-aware devices.
In order to obtain real-time accuracy and resolution, handsets can be built with Global Positioning System (GPS) equipment. As GPS chips become cheaper, mobile handset manufacturers are able to provision even low-end handsets, laptops, or external cards with the GPS chips. However, once this information acquired off-network is sent to third parties, through applications such as Google's mapping software, there is no guarantee how this information will be used.
Network operators should not ignore the potential risks and opportunities of a mobile computing future where device location and thereby user location, will be available to third party services, even if the operator does not directly provision this information. The potential competitive advantage of the network operator is the fact that location information based on cell ID is easier to provision from the end-user's perspective than other alternatives.
In the enterprise arena, it is argued that LBS will only take root once standards have matured for enterprise computing. A need for LBS standards to ensure interoperability between applications and services is being pursued in organizations such as the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA). In this arena, the most important standard is Mobile Location Protocol (MLP), which defines data standards, authentication and access standards for LBS.
However, MLP alone does not provide support for modeling relative descriptions of location. Furthermore, MLP alone does not provide data in a distributed fashion, where servers can share location data as needed, instead of relying on a single server as an information source.
Many of these attempts at providing LBS are hampered in that given sources of location information are not always available. GPS devices are useful for identifying a devices position, expressed as a latitude and longitude coordinate pair, when the device is located outside of structures in rural areas where neighboring structures do not provide an impediment to receiving sufficient satellite transmissions to identify the devices location. However, oftentimes in urban areas or inside of buildings, a mobile devices position based on GPS may not be available. Other sources of location information may be available in these areas, such as through identification of a location of Access Points (APs) or cellular towers which the mobile device is associated with, yet these same sources of location information may be unavailable in rural areas where there sources may be too widely distributed to be of use in discerning the mobile devices location.
A system exists to utilize location information that may be obtained from one or more devices. The location information may be determined by the device listening for wireless network base-stations and then looking up coordinates for the wireless network base-stations in a data file that is downloaded from a central server. By triangulation utilizing the base-stations locations, the device may determine an approximation of its position. While this system enables a local determination of a given geographic location of a device, it provides no guidance of how to build a database to correlate different geographic locations. The system also does not enable sharing the location information so that other devices may benefit from the determination. In addition, locations are provided with unique identifiers that may only be meaningful to a given user and therefore, the names may not be useful to other users even if they could be shared.
Location information collected from prior networks is commonly not continuous and/or accurate to an arbitrary degree of resolution. Further, an LBS that requires real-time accuracy and resolution may benefit by not relying solely on network sources.
Accordingly, a need exists to discern and share a device's location that transcends any one particular source of location information to facilitate LBS deployment.
It is an object of the present system to overcome disadvantages and/or make improvements in the prior art.